Back to Blood

15





The Yentas


Seven hours later, 10:30 a.m., Nestor and John Smith were driving… or, strictly speaking, John Smith was driving… into the parking lot of the Alhambra Lakes once more, this time in John Smith’s brand-new gray two-door Chevrolet Assent. John Smith thought it would be rude to park Nestor’s Camaro in an Active Adults’ parking lot in daylight. The Camaro was a muscle car from back when muscle cars were muscle cars, and it was pimped out so ferociously, it would shove its mug into any Active Adult’s face and snarl, “I’m a youthful offender. You got a problem with that?”

Of course—hah!—John Smith didn’t say “rude” or anything close to it. He expressed it in carefully hedged, gentler words, but on this killer-bright day John Smith’s good manners annoyed Nestor… his manners, among a dozen other things. Still inside the Assent’s air-conditioned cocoon they trolled slowly toward the building Igor had disappeared into last night. In flagrant sunlight like this, the place looked even worse than it had in the dark. All around the base was a stretch of raggedy bare ground that no doubt at one time had been flush with lush green shrubbery. Here and there about the rim of the parking lot you saw a palm tree here… and two there… and then a gap… and three there… gap… then another lone palm tree… The whole place appeared snaggletoothed. The palms were limp and wan… the leaves bore puce-colored splotches. On the building’s facade the little iron balconettes and the aluminum frames for the sliding doors looked as if they were about to fall off and die in a pile.

John Smith pointed and said, “Hey, look… Igor’s Vulcan’s gone.”

So far, so good. Before they confronted him, they needed to know a lot more… such as what he was doing here last night… and what and where was all that stuff he hauled inside. John Smith made a U-turn at the end of the row of cars and parked in the most remote section, the one for visitors.

When they got out of the car, Nestor was really annoyed. He put on the jacket of the suit John had talked him into wearing and slid the necktie up. The jacket was too small, as he knew it would be. On top of that, John Smith insisted that Nestor carry a 9½-inches-long, 3½-inches-wide, 1½-inches-thick dosimeter—a device for measuring noise levels—in an inside jacket pocket. If anybody challenged them, Nestor was to pull out the dosimeter, and he, John Smith, would explain that they were taking noise levels. A too-tight suit bulging with a fifty-cubic-inch machine on one side—great. Before he had taken his first step, he could feel the inside of his shirt collar turning sodden with sweat… and sweat soaking through his jacket, creating big dark half-moons under his armpits. The suit, the tie, his black leather cop shoes… he looked like a real guajiro… John Smith, on the other hand, had on a light-gray suit that fit perfectly, a white shirt, a navy tie with some kind of stuffy, orderly print on it, and black leather shoes trim and narrow enough to go dancing in. He acted like it didn’t bother him at all… the damned WASP… Then he had to rub it in:

“Nestor!… you look great! If you knew how good you look in a suit, you’d never wear anything else!”

Nestor had never seen the WASP in such a cheery mood before. So he shot him a finger. But John was in such a good mood, he started laughing his head off over that.

The whole sky was the pale blue dome of a heat lamp. Nestor hadn’t walked a hundred feet before he could feel the sweat pouring out for real. The parking lot was so still, he could hear their footsteps on the asphalt. Yet practically all the parking places for the tenants were occupied. Just then a hoarse, grumbling, transmission-slipping, piston-done-for bus, the small boxy kind, painted white, came groaning in off the road. The fenders flared up in big curves like the wings of a pelican in flight. It pulled up not far from Nestor and John. On the roof a foot-high sign stuck up in the air from front to back: SHOP ’N’ BROWSE BUY BUS! It seemed to be a bus service that took groups of people from their Active Adult and Assisted Living homes to shopping centers and back. The driver hopped out. Look at that suntan!—a skinny young Anglo who looked as if his hide were just shipped from the tannery! He hustled around to the other side… to help a lot of old ladies get off, judging by the voices. They didn’t sound tired. They sounded excited.

“… but such… a… sale I’ve never seen…”

“… who on earth needs four? But look in this shopping beg—go ahead, take a look in!…”

“… didn’t even use all my coupons…”

“… thirty minutes from now? You better forget about the lemon meringue…”

“… yeah, only one kesh register open and such… a… line you…”

“… ‘Attention shoppers,’ every two minutes ‘Attention shoppers’—gives me a migraine you wouldn’t believe!…”

“… pushy pushy pushy, the nerve of some people the way they push…”

“… don’t keh! Walgreens has better buys!…”

“… meringue eleven-fifteen, maybe you can get on line! Me, eleven-fifteen I gotta go up and take my pills…”

… All this to the accompaniment of music—of a beat, anyway—an irregular metallic beat, actually… clink clink… clatter clatter clatter… clink… clatter… clink clink clatter…

As Nestor and John drew closer, they could see the old ladies heading into the building, quite a few supporting themselves on aluminum walkers that clinked and clattered clattered and clink clink clinked… Only two old men… At least half of the old ladies, even the ones on the walkers, were carrying shopping bags… Walgreens… Walmart… CVS… Winn-Dixie… Marshalls… JCPenney… Chico’s… the Gap… Macy’s… Target… ShopRite… Banana Republic… Naturalizer…

Home! Back home bearing the kill they came! The élan of a party of deadeye hunters returning from the field was what they had.

“What’s all this meringue?” said Nestor.

“Beats me,” said John Smith. “We let them all go inside and get settled before we go in.”

Okaaaaay… “the reporter”… All day John Smith had been directing this operation. He had assumed the role of captain. Maybe on this terrain “the reporter” knew best… Nestor doubted it, but he was heavily dependent upon John Smith. What other ally did he have? All right… let him run this his way.

So they stood outside the building. John Smith motioned for him to take out the dosimeter. Nestor, already soaked with sweat though he was, had to admit John Smith was right… the suits… the machine… nobody was likely to identify them as a pair of shady young punks loitering around an active adults apartment building and up to no good. Two properly attired young men was what they were, two young gentlemen willing to wear all these clothes while the heat lamp in the sky was heading for the max… they must have a serious mission or they wouldn’t be here.

Once the way had cleared to John Smith’s satisfaction, it was a minute or so after 11:30. The big front entrance was not an entrance in any formal architectural sense. It was nothing but a ten-foot-high, thirty-foot-long corridor where two sides of the building joined.

Thank God… no concierge desk or anything else to check who was going in or out. John Smith and Nestor walked right on in and found themselves standing on the edge of a courtyard framed by four sides of the building coming together to create a square. Like the exterior, the courtyard of the Alhambra Lakes was the fried remains of what must have been a full gardenscape of palm trees, shrubbery, and flowers once upon a time… and at dead center, a square pool with a worn-out fountain that feebly projected a single, spent spout of water up to about three feet above the surface of the pool. On the second and third floors wide slabs of concrete projected from the interior walls all the way around the square, creating a walkway, an outsized catwalk, as it were, and a back porch for every apartment on the floor. An open stairway connected all three levels in case you didn’t want to take the elevator they had passed on the way in.

“We’ll take the elevator up to the top,” said John Smith, describing a great loop in the air with his forefinger, “and work our way down to the second floor and then down here to the courtyard, okay?”

They had the elevator to themselves on the way up. At the top, the third floor, they stepped out onto the walkway… and into a loud, noxious mechanical noise. On the far side a brown-skinned maintenance man in coveralls was cleaning the catwalk with an industrial vacuum cleaner. From somewhere below came the clinking clacking tintinnabulation of a couple of aluminum walkers. Nearby… the too-loud yawps of TV sets within the apartments… but no tenants were out in the noonday sun on this floor. John Smith went slowly past the apartments on this side, and Nestor followed, holding the “sonar audiometric monitor”… ::::::What am I—a native bearer?:::::: Somewhere within an apartment a television show was turned on so loud, you could hear every word… “But he’s been her gastroenterologist for five years!” says the unmistakably soapopera voice of a young woman. “And now he falls in love with her?—while spreading her cheeks for a colonoscopy? Oh, men”—she begins loading every word with sobs—“Men—men—mennn-uh-uh-uh-uh—they lead an entirely separate life below the beh-eh-he-ehlt!” Beside the door, on the floor of the catwalk, was a cast-iron frog, painted light green. It was only about a foot high, but it was also about a foot wide and fifteen inches long… which made it look enormous and heavy. On either side of the door was a small window. John Smith and Nestor made a point of not being nosy and looking in. The next apartment was identical, except that the program bellowing inside for all it was worth was some comedy show with the most annoying laugh track Nestor had ever heard… and beside the door was a two-foot-high cast-iron caveman with arms and shoulders like a gorilla’s. It looked heavier than the frog. At the next apartment… God almighty!… a what?—Discovery Channel show?—a bunch of lions roaring, not just one but what did they call them?—a “pride”? Must be turned up to the max, because between the lions and the industrial vacuum cleaner Nestor felt like the noise out here in this active adults pile of bricks had him paralyzed… Beside this door, a big pot of red geraniums, a regular mass of red geraniums… that turned out to be fakes.

John Smith had to get close to Nestor to make himself heard. “Keep an eye on those… things by the doors, whatever they are”—he pointed toward the flowerpot—“for something that says ‘artist,’ okay?”

Nestor nodded. He was already fed up with taking orders from John Smith. Who did he think he had become all of a sudden, the great detective?

They checked out two more apartments. Same thing… John Smith came up close to Nestor again and said, “I’ve never heard TV sets on that loud. What are they—deaf?”

“They’re on aluminum walkers, for God’s sake,” said Nestor. “If they’re not deaf, who is?” He didn’t say it with a smile. He could tell John Smith had no idea at all where the overtone of reproof had come from. So then Nestor felt guilty.

It was so loud out here on this catwalk that neither Nestor nor John Smith realized that two figures were coming up behind them until they were almost upon them… two old ladies. One seemed terribly small. Her back was humped so far over her walker, her eyes were at about the level of Nestor’s rib cage… and so rheumy, they constantly leaked tears. Her remaining hair had been dyed blond and teased up into little puffs of spun cilia meant to give the impression of thick hair, but Nestor could see right through them to the skin of her skull. All at once he felt consumed by pity and a rogue desire to protect her. The other old lady stood upright with the help of a cane. Her hair was white and thinning so badly that the part on one side looked more like a bald spot. But she had retained a lot of extra pounds and had a big round face… and she wasn’t shy. She walked right up to John Smith and said, “Can I help you? You looking for something, maybe?”

The way she said it—she was a formidable presence. John Smith uttered some garbled name… “Gunnar Gerter”?… and… gestured toward Nestor and said, “This is my technician, Mr. Carbonell.”

::::::my technician::::::

“We’re taking noise-level readings,” said John Smith… He gestured toward the dosimeter Nestor was holding ::::::like a flunky::::::

“Hahhh!” She let out a sardonic laugh. “At this place? Noise? More noise I’d like to hear. You know what you have to be to make noise? Alive.”

John Smith smiled. “I don’t know about that. We’re getting some pretty high readings right here.” Now he gestured toward the industrial vacuum cleaner and then toward the apartment they stood in front of. TV game show cheers shrieked from within. Before the woman could get onto such questions as Why? Who sent you? From where? John Smith said, “By the way, perhaps you can tell me something. We’ve been admiring your little statues by the doors. You have some artist here who does them?”

“Hughhhh”—a disdainful chortle from the little old lady bent over her walker. She had a shrill and surprisingly strong voice—“Artists? We got one artist here, or that’s what he calls himself. Me, I never saw anything he ever did. Mainly he stinks the place up. The smell coming from his apartment is terrible, terrible. Are you from the Environment?”

The environment? Nestor couldn’t imagine what she meant, but John Smith didn’t skip a beat. “Yes, we are.”

The stout woman with the cane said, “Oh, finally already somebody comes! You could die from this stink. We been complaining about this guy for three months. We complain and complain and nobody comes. We leave messages, and nobody calls. Whatta you people got there for the messages, an answering machine or one a those trash bags, the plastic ones, the color of what I’m not gonna say.”

The little old lady on the walker interrupted. “Come on, Lil. We gotta get to the dining room—to the meringy.”

“Meringy? It’s not meringy, Edith. Meringy is some kind a dance. It’s merang, lemon meringue.”

“I know, I know, but if we don’t get there, it’ll be gone, and today’s the only day they have it.”

“Edith… and today’s the only day the Environment comes here. Besides, sometimes there’s some left. Dahlia can save us some. She puts them in her bag.”

“Hughhhh! You hear that?” said the stout woman. She pointed down toward the lower floors.

Sure enough, you could hear a rising percussion concert of clink clatterclatter clink clink clatter, even louder than the one Nestor and John Smith had heard coming out of the Shop ’n’ Browse Buy Bus. A lot of people on aluminum walkers were trying to get somewhere fast.

“And that don’t even count the people,” said Edith, “the people who go down there and line up a half hour before the dining room opens on meringy day is what Hannah and Mr. Cutter do.”

The stout one, Lil, didn’t even bother correcting the meringy. She was busy talking to John Smith. “There is such… a… stink in this place; you can even smell it right here. Do you smell it?… Smell! Smell! Take a good smell!”

She was so bossy, Nestor inhaled and took a good smell. He didn’t smell anything unusual. Edith, the smaller one, said: “My doctor says it’s toxic… toxic… Look it up, toxic. It’s the reason I don’t eat right, I don’t sleep. The doctor is doubling my doses of fish oil every week. Even my hair stinks from the smell going around everywhere.”

“Where is this apartment?” said John Smith.

“Right under my apartment,” said Lil, pointing down the row of doors on the catwalk. “Such… a… stink comes up, no matter what I do.”

“Me, too,” said Edith, “but Lil’s is worse.”

John Smith said to Lil, “Have you ever tried talking to him about it?”

“Tried? I’ve camped outside his door. Talk about a smell! You could smell the stink coming out of his door. Neighborly he’s not. I’ve seen him, but I never seen him go in or come out. He must do it in the dark. I’ve never seen him in the dining room. I hear him down in his apartment. But nobody knows his phone number or his e-mail. I go down and I ring his bell, I knock on his door, and he don’t answer. I send him a letter, and he don’t write back. So I call you people, and you don’t do bupkis. And it’s not just me and Edith. Everybody on his floor has to breathe that stink. It’s like poison gas or nuclear radiation. It’s a good thing nobody here’s having children anymore. They’d be born with one arm or no nose or a tongue that don’t reach the front teeth or with their bowels up in their chests and they’ll do everything out their ears and talk with their belly buttons and think outta brains located in what they sit down on. Close your eyes and see it. You try it. You try talking to him.”

John Smith and Nestor looked at each other… nonplussed. Then John Smith managed a smile and said, “I don’t even know his name.”

“His name is Nicolai,” said Lil. “His last name starts with K but after that it’s all v’s and k’s and y’s and z’s. A collision at an intersection they sound like they had.”

John Smith and Nestor looked at each other. They didn’t need to say it out loud. “Nicolai? Not Igor?”

“Do me a favor,” John Smith said. “Take us there, to his apartment, so we’ll know exactly which one.”

“Hahhh—a guide you don’t need!” piped up Edith. “You got maybe a nose?”

“Edith’s right,” said Lil. “But I’ll take you there anyway. Too long already we been waiting for somebody from the Environment.”

So all four, including clink clatter clatter clink Edith with her walker, got on the elevator, and Lil led them to “Nicolai’s” door on the second level’s catwalk. Beside the door was a two-foot-high metal statue of a tall man extending his right arm, palm-down, in a salute.

John Smith leaned toward Nestor and said, “That’s Chairman Mao, except that Chairman Mao was more like five-two. Right there he’s six-five. Igor is… weird.”

::::::How does he know these things?::::::

The smell—it was strong, all right… but not unpleasant, if you asked Nestor. It was turpentine. He had always liked the smell of turpentine… but maybe if you had to live next door on this catwalk and smell somebody else’s turpentine fumes day and night, you might get fume-whipped pretty fast.

John Smith walked past six or seven doors on the catwalk this way… and six or seven that way… and returned to “Nicolai’s” apartment.

“Yeah, it’s pretty strong everywhere,” said John Smith. He looked at Lil. “We have to get inside there and find out exactly what the source is before we can do anything. How can we get in? Any ideas?”

“The manager’s got a key to every apartment.”

“Where’s the manager?”

“Hahhhh!” said Edith. “The manager’s never here!”

“Where is he?” said John Smith.

“Hahhhh! Who knows? So Phyllis fills in and covers for him. She says she likes it. Phyllis Easy to Please is what I call her.”

“Who’s Phyllis?”

“She’s a tenant,” said Lil.

“A tenant fills in for the manager?”

Lil said, “A manager here’s like a super—a superintendent—in New York. A janitor with a title is what the manager is.”

Nestor spoke up for the first time. “You’re from New York?”

Edith, not Lil, answered the question. “Hahhh! Everybody here is from New York, or Long Island—the whole town moved down here. Who do you think lives in these places, people from Florida, maybe?”

“So does Phyllis have the key?”

“If anybody’s got the key,” said Lil, “Phyllis got the key. Want me to call her?” She took out her cell phone.

“By all means!” said John Smith.

“Nicolai—she don’t think he’s fifty-five in the first place. Phyllis don’t,” said Edith. “It ends up, he’s got to go to the office sometimes. Phyllis knows what he looks like. He’s got a big mustache goes out like this, but I haven’t seen him in a long time. You got to be fifty-five and no pets and no children to buy a condo.”

Lil had already turned her back for privacy. The one thing Nestor heard her say clearly was “You sitting down? You ready for this?… The Environment’s here.”

Lil turned toward them, closing her cell phone. She said to John, “She’s coming up! She can’t believe the Environment’s here, either.”

In no time a tall, bony old woman—Phyllis—arrived. She looked at John Smith and Nestor with a long face. Lil introduced her to them. Thank God, Lil remembered Nestor’s new last name, “Carbonell,” because he had already forgotten it. Phyllis’s scowl changed from a scowl to a smile of withering scorn.

“Took you only three months to get here,” she said. “But maybe that’s what you Government people call ‘rapid response.’ ”

John Smith closed his eyes, spread his lips into a flat grimace, and began nodding his head in the yes mode conveying the notion Yes, yes, it hurts, but I have to admit I know exactly what you mean. Then he opened his eyes and gave her a profoundly sincere look and said, “But when we do get here, we… are… here. Know what I’m saying?”

Nestor winced and said to himself, ::::::I don’t believe this.:::::: Now he understood what it took to be a newspaper reporter: double-talk and heartfelt lies.

It must have mildly reassured stone-faced Phyllis, however, for she shot them both looks of merely mild disdain and produced a key and unlocked the apartment door.

It opened into a kitchen, a small filthy kitchen. About a week’s worth of dishes and tinny-looking knives and forks and spoons with the remains not even scraped off had been stacked up helter-skelter in the sink. About a week’s worth of unidentifiable spots, gobs, and spills were all over the counters on either side of the basin and on the floor. About a week’s worth of garbage, fortunately desiccated by now, lay crammed into a tinny trash canister to the point where it kept the lid from closing. The place was so filthy, the pervasive smell of turpentine struck Nestor as a purifier.

Phyllis led them from the kitchen into what was no doubt designed to be a living room. Right in front of the sliding glass doors on the far wall was a big, dark, ancient-looking wooden easel. Next to it was a long industrial worktable with a stack of metal drawers at each end. The top was cluttered with tubes, rags, and God knows what else, plus a row of coffee cans with the long slender handles of paintbrushes sticking out. The easel and the table rested upon a piece of paint-spattered tarpaulin at least seven feet by seven feet. That was the only floor covering in the room. The rest was bare wood… that hadn’t been attended to in a long time. The place looked halfway studio and halfway storeroom, thanks to the boxes and pieces of equipment piled in no discernable order against one of the side walls—rolls of canvas… big boxes, long, wide, but only three or four inches deep… Nestor guessed they were for framed pictures… a slide projector on top of a small metal stand about three and a half feet high… a dehumidifier… and more boxes and cans…

All this Nestor took in with a single glance. But Lil, Edith, Phyllis, and John Smith were absorbed in something else entirely. On the other wall were twelve paintings, six in one row and six in a row beneath it. The women were chuckling.

“You gotta look at this one, Edith,” said Lil. “This one’s got two eyes on the same side of his nose and look at the size a that schnozz! You see that? You see it? I got a grandson-seven-years-old’s better than that. He’s not so little he don’t know where the eyes go!”

The three women began laughing, and Nestor had to laugh, too. The painting consisted of the thick clumsy outline of a man in profile with a childishly huge nose. Both eyes were on this side of it. The hands looked like fish. There was no attempt at shading or perspective. There was nothing but more thick, clumsy black outlines creating shapes filled in with flat colors… and no attempt to make any of them stand out from the others.

“And the one next to it,” Lil continued. “See those four women theh? Talk about afflicted! See that? They got the eyes in the right place—but the nose! The poor things, they got noses that start up over one eyebrow, and then they come down as far as a normal girl’s chin, and the nostrils look like a double-barrel shotgun-wants-to-blow-your-kop-off-for-you!”

More squalls of laughter.

“And take a look at that one up theh,” said Edith. This one was of nothing but vertical stripes of color… must have been a dozen of them… and not all that even, either. And why were they so watery? “Looks like they got soaked up by the canvas some way.”

“I don’t think that’s suppose a be a painting,” said Phyllis. “He was just getting the paint off his brushes is what I think.”

She said it in an absolutely Phyllis-like way. Phyllis never joked around, but Lil and Edith and Nestor had to laugh anyway. They were all having a great time making fun of the deluded Russian who thinks he’s an artist.

“Hahhh, you see that one?” said Edith. “That poor zhlub, he takes a ruler and he makes that cross theh’s-about-to-fall-over and he looks at it and says, ‘Shmuck!’ ”—hitting herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand—“ ‘I give up!’ and he paints the rest of it plain white-you-gotta-give-him-credit. It’s better’n ’at cockamamie cross!”

The three women laughed and laughed, and Nestor couldn’t hold back a chuckle himself.

They took a look at that one with all the tapeworms-jumped-out-of-the-john and that one with the hands-look-like-two-clumps-of-asparagus and the one on the end theh—looks-like-a-pile-a-shucked-oysters-gone-high, and get that one!—the one below it—Tethered at Collioure. Tethered must mean you smear glue all over the thing and then you dump a bag full a different-colored confetti on it and you got yourself a painting!… and by the time they get to that one theh of the patchwork-quilt-only-he-can’t-draw-a-straight-line-and-it’s-all-falling-to-pieces… and that one of a pitcher of beer and a tobacco-pipe-cut-in-half… and that one theh—looks like two aluminum nudes-with-screw-on-nipples… and that one next to it-looks-like-three-aluminum-men-eating-playing-cards… and they’re laughing until the tears come, they’re shaking their heads, pulling faces, putting on sardonic smiles or intentionally retarded gapes with their mouths hanging open, rolling their eyeballs up so far they practically disappear. Edith is so swept away, she’s still hunched over, leaning on her walker, but she manages to stamp her feet up and down in a paroxysm of hilarity gone wild. Not even the dead serious iron-faced Phyllis can resist. She breaks out of her iron capsule with a single burst of laughter—“Honnnkkuhhh!”

Lil says, “An artist he’s supposed to be, and that’s the best he can do? I’d come and go in the dark, too! My face I wouldn’ wanna show people!”

Another round of uncontrollable laugher… even Nestor’s professional resolve turns to jelly, and he’s laughing, too. He looks over at John Smith to catch his reaction… and John Smith is oblivious of it all. He might as well be all by himself. He has his little narrow spiral notebook and his trick ballpoint out, and he’s busy looking at the paintings one by one and taking notes.

Nestor sidles over and says to him, “Hey, John, whattaya doin’?” John Smith acts as if he didn’t hear him and pulls a small camera out of an inside pocket of his jacket and starts taking pictures of the paintings one by one. He walks amidst the women as if he doesn’t know they’re there… Lil leans down to Edith’s level and says in a low voice, “The big-shot.”

Then he walked back past them, eyes fixed on the rear screen of the camera. Thing had him in a trance. He didn’t even look up when he reached Nestor. With his back to the three women, he lowered his head, eyes fixed on his notebook, and said, “You know what you’re looking at on that wall?”

“No. Somebody’s day care center?”

“You’re looking at two Picassos, one Morris Louis, one Malevich, one Kandinsky, a Matisse, a Soutine, a Derain, a Delaunay, a Braque, and two Légers.” For the first time during this recitation, John Smith lifted his head enough to see Nestor face-to-face. “Take a good look, Nestor. You’re looking at twelve of the most perfect, most subtle forgeries you or anybody else is ever going to lay eyes on. Don’t worry. These aren’t by ‘Nicolai.’ These are by a real artist.”

With that, John Smith winked a confident, reassuring wink at Nestor.

::::::The hell with you and your reassuring me. You’re trying to act like a real detective.::::::

To be on the safe side, Magdalena had come to the office an hour early, 7:00 a.m. She had been sitting here in her white uniform rigid as a corpse… or up to a point. This corpse’s heart was going 100 b.p.m. and heading for tachycardia. The girl was braced for the worst.

Ordinarily the Worst arrived about 7:40, twenty minutes before the office opened, to brief himself on what the eight o’clock patient has been puling and mewling about… He often told Magdalena he couldn’t imagine himself becoming so weak that he’d go whining to somebody like himself, to put himself up on a stage as the star of a tragedy before an audience of one… one you had to pay five hundred dollars an hour to show uppppAHGGAHHHhahahock hock hock!

This isn’t an ordinary morning, however. This morning she’s going to do it. She keeps telling herself that. Say no now! What possible good would it do to keep stringing it out? Do it, do it! Say no now!

On an ordinary morning, the two of them arrived at the office sitting next to each other in the front seat of his white Audi convertible, top down he insists, and the hell with a big girl’s hair… from his apartment with two basins in the bathroom he thinks are swell… where they would have taken a shower… then gotten dressed and eaten breakfast.

She hadn’t prepared exactly what to say, because there was no predicting which variety of tiresome and obnoxious he was going to be. She remembered Norman’s story of “the pissing monkey.” He had put the moral of that story to good use when it came time to deal with a pissing monkey named Ike Walsh of 60 Minutes. Stripped down to its essentials, the moral was: Immobilize the monkey so he can’t get on top. But was that the only strategy she had on her side, a fable about a monkey? Her heart sped up, and she despaired of any way to keep Norman from nailing her anytime he cared to. Norman was big and strong physically, and he had a temper… not that he ever handled her roughly… and the minutes were ticking by.

She had to calm down… and so she tried to stop thinking about Norman’s volatile, ego-swollen self. She tried to focus on the immediate surroundings… the examining table, white, clean, with a fitted sheet that fit the mattress so tightly, the surface was taut… the pale beigey-gray chair the patients usually sat in for their Lust-No-Mo injections, although some of the taller ones preferred to sit on the edge of the examining table when she gave them their shots… such as Maurice Fleischmann. ::::::Come on, Magdalena!:::::: She couldn’t very well put Norman out of her mind if she was going to let her thoughts stray to Maurice. Here you had one of the most powerful men in Miami. All sorts of people jumped when he came around… jumped to do anything to make him happy… jumped to make sure he had the best seat in the room… deferred to whatever he had to say… grinned all over him… laughed at anything he said that might possibly be construed as an intentional humorous affect…

… while Norman led him around like a dog. Norman had the Big Man convinced that only Norman Lewis, M.D., P.C., could do anything to lead him out of the darkness of the valley of the shadow of pornography. He even let Norman come along on his social rounds, which were among the mighty rich. Magdalena had suspected it from the beginning but by now knew it was true: Norman made sure that Maurice would never be free of his addiction to pornography… just think of the way he rubbed Maurice’s nose in it at Art Basel… Norman needed Maurice to remain in his wretched condition… Maurice opened all the doors that would be closed to any run-of-the-mill pornography addiction swami. She resolved at that moment to be strong… and tell Maurice in so many words exactly what was going on… once this—

—the lock of the outer door was opening… Sure enough, it was 7:40. ::::::Now, remember, you texted him in plenty of time to say you would be spending the night at home… and there is no reason he shouldn’t realize that “at home” means at my own apartment, the one I share with Amélia. What’s so wrong about going over and spending some time catching up on what Amélia’s been doing? I haven’t heard you suggest that we get married or anything like that, have I?… No, you mustn’t say that… You mustn’t even hint that you’ve been thinking about letting yourself get entangled any further with his perverted life—no!—and don’t even suggest that he’s a pervert, for God’s sake… Come on! Cut it out! There’s no way to plan anything you’re going to say to Norman… Just remember, you’re not going to let him piss on you::::::—

Another latch turns, meaning he’s in the office itself now. Magdalena’s heart is going at a runaway pace. She never knew you could hear footfalls in this place. The floor is nothing but a concrete slab covered with synthetic carpet. Nevertheless, she could hear Norman coming nearer. His shoes made a faint scritch sound. Magdalena told herself to be very calm and cool. So she sat there like someone waiting to be executed… scritch… scritch… scritch… he was getting closer. ::::::I can’t just sit here like this, like he’s got my wrists strapped to the arms of the chair and I’m resigned to my fate.:::::: She stood up and went over to the pale beigey-gray cabinet—everything was pale beigey-gray in this office—where the syringes and doses of anti-libido serum were kept and pushed them around on a shelf in order to sound busy… scritch… scritch… SCRITCH… Uhohhhh… no more scritch. He must have been right in the doorway, but she wasn’t going to turn around to see. A few seconds went by… and nothing. It seemed like an eternity…

“Well… good morning,” said the voice, neither friendly nor unfriendly… Room temperature was all it was.

She turned about, as if surprised—and immediately regretted that. Why would she be surprised? “Good morning!” she said… ::::::Damn! That was slightly above room temperature.:::::: She didn’t want to sound warm and friendly.

Norman looked huge to her. He wore a tan gabardine suit she hadn’t seen before, a white shirt, and a brown necktie with an unfortunately picturesque print of goblins—must have been a dozen of them—skiing down a steep brown slope. He smiled without saying anything. It was the sort of smile in which the upper lip is lifted so that you can see the two pointed eyeteeth. She got a good eyeful of the teeth before he said, with a slight smile that she searched for irony:

“I wasn’t sure whether you’d be here this morning.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She meant it to sound offhand and immediately realized it sounded combative.

“Oh, you don’t remember? You stood me up last night. Rather unceremoniously.”

“Unceremoniously?” said Magdalena. “What does that mean?” It was actually a relief of an odd sort to come right out and admit she didn’t know what these people were talking about.

“You could have at least told me yesterday before you skipped out.”

“Skipped out!” said Magdalena. “I sent you a text!”

“Yeah, about ten o’clock at night. You sent me one miserable little text.” Norman was beginning to get a bit heated. “Why didn’t you call me? Afraid I might answer? And when I called you, you had the phone turned off.”

“Amélia went to bed early, and I didn’t want to wake her up. So I shut off the phone.”

“Eminently thoughtful,” said Norman, “eminently thoughtful. Oh, eminently means the same as highly in this case, okay? Does highly help? No? Too big a word? Then make it ‘very.’ Okay? ‘very’ thoughtful. Okay?”

“No use being… that way about it, Norman.”

“What time did you go to bed, sweetheart? And where? Or is it no use being that way, either?”

“I’ve already told you—”

“You’ve already told me absolutely nothing that makes sense. So why don’t you try being honest and tell me what the f*ck’s going on?”

“Don’t use those words if you want to talk to me, okay? But since you’ve asked, I will mention something I haven’t brought up with you before. Do you know that you have a way of filling up a room until there’s no air left?”

“Oh hohhh. ‘Filling up a room until there’s no air left’! How literary we are all of a sudden. What’s that metaphor supposed to mean?”

“What’s a met—”

“What’s a meta… for, right? I thought we were in the literary mode this morning. What’s a ‘mode’? Okay, let’s make it ‘mood’ instead. You know ‘mood’?”

His lip was lifted still higher to show his upper teeth. He looked like a snarling animal. It frightened Magdalena, but she was even more afraid of the pissing monkey overcoming her and subjecting her to God knew what, because now he had a whole head full of anger. She glanced about the office. It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning. Was there anybody else in this building who would hear a thing? ::::::Don’t be so frightened! Just do it—::::::

—and she heard herself saying, “You said to be honest and tell you what’s going on. Okay, what’s going on is… you. You fill up a room… and me, up to here”—she put the edge of her flat palm against her throat—“with sex, and I don’t mean the joy of sex, either. I mean perverted sex. I can’t believe you took poor Maurice to those pornographic art shows at Art Basel and then stood by and let him buy all these pieces of plain, out-and-out pornography by this Jed Whatever-his-name-is and let him spend millions on them. I can’t believe you were dying to go to that orgy, the Columbus Day Regatta, in the first place, but you also wanted me to join in, and if I had, you would have, too. I can’t believe I even let you persuade me to do that ‘role-playing’ you sprang on me as soon as we started living together, the time you had me carry that black suitcase hard as a piece a-uh-uh-uhh—fiberglass and pretend like I was knocking on your hotel door by mistake and let you ravish me, you called it, and tear my clothes off, and let you pull the thong of my panties out and do it to me from behind. I can’t believe I let you do that, and I spend two days trying to persuade myself this is ‘sexual freedom’! Freedom—ohmygod—si ahogarme en un pozo de mierda es la libertad, encontré la libertad.”

Norman didn’t say a word. He looked at Magdalena as if she had suddenly given him a two-finger killer karate jab in the Adam’s apple, and he was studying her, trying to figure out why. When he finally spoke, it was in a low voice… with his upper teeth bared but without a smile. “So you just neglected to mention all this before—what is all this bullshit?”

“I told you—”

“Oh, I know, you’re too proper for talk like that. You know what? You’re about as proper as the last blow job you gave me. Do you know that!?”

“You’re the one who said ‘Be honest’!”

“And this is your idea of being honest? This is your idea of—something. I don’t know what, but it’s something clinically sick!”

“ ‘Clinically sick’… is that a medical term? Is that what you tell Maurice his problem is? He’s ‘clinically sick’? You want Maurice to stay sick, don’t you? You want him to have pus blisters—right?! Otherwise, nobody’s gonna be getting you through the VIP door into Art Basel or getting you a slip for your cigarette boat on Fisher Island or getting you into Chez Toi or what’s that special upper floor, the Chez Toi Club or whatever it is, with the black card?”

“God damn it—”

“It’s not enough for you to be a prominent TV schloctor, is it? Noooo, you want respect, don’t you! You want to—”

“Why, you bitch!”

“—be a socialite! Right! You wanna be invited to all the parties! So you’re gonna give poor Maurice your ‘clinically sick’ diagnosis until—”

Norman made an animal sound and before Magdalena knew what was happening, he had grabbed her by the upper arm, just beneath the shoulder, and jerked her upward by the arm and jerked her body near his by the arm, and half-hissed, half-growled, “Oh, I’ll give you a diagnosis, bitch… you’re a bitch, bitch!”

“Stop it!” said Magdalena. It was close to a scream. In that instant she was terrified. The animal sound of his voice—he called her a bitch—he was manhandling her—“Bitch!”—jerking her this way—“Bitch!”—and that —“Bitch!”—and this time she shrieked the bloodiest shriek she had ever shrieked in her life! “Stop it!” Norman swung his head about as if looking for something ::::::the bastard! He wants to make sure no one is aware of what he’s doing!:::::: Norman’s grip slackens for that split second… Magdalena breaks loose… more shrieking shrieking shrieking shrieking shrieking shrieking to the roar of you bitch—“Bitch!—you don’t—you bitch!”—he’s right behind her!… she throws herself at the crossbar latch of the door that opens out into the parking courtyard and stumbles into the sunlight, cars circling looking for parking spots, some man in a passenger seat yells, “You okay?” and doesn’t pause long enough to find out but it stops Norman, anyway. Not even that sex-crazed hulk of egoplasm dares to be seen running like a madman out into a public parking lot physically overpowering a shrieking girl half his age. Nevertheless she runs through the ranks of parked cars hunched over so that he won’t see her head pop above the roof of a car and go mad enough to… scampers hunched over… gasping for every next breath… as afraid of dying as she has ever been in her life… her heart hammering away in her chest. ::::::Where do I go? I can’t go to my apartment… he knows where that is!… He’s turned into an animal!::::::

She reaches the car… crouches way down beside it… the door! ::::::Get in! Lock it!::::::… she starts to put her hand into—and a terrible heat begins rising up into her cranial cavity, burning the lining of her skull… she doesn’t have her handbag! In her wild rush to escape, she left it in the examination room… her car keys and the remote and her key to the apartment… her credit cards… cash… cell phone… driver’s license!—her only ID in this world except for her passport, but that’s in the apartment, and he has the key now! He has it all, even her makeup… She doesn’t dare stay here crouched beside her car… he knows the car! What if he—

—scurried hunched over until she finally saw the exit on the far side… Even then she didn’t dare walk through upright… People were looking at her, a young nurse in white scurrying out of a parking lot… hunched way over like that… Look at her! So young, and she’s out to lunch or she’s having a stroke! That girl needs a lot of help… and who’s going to give it to her?… Don’t look at me.

Noon on yet another identical Miami day, the sky a pale-blue white-hot dome radiating ferocious heat and blinding light down upon all the shoppers on Collins Avenue and giving them stumpy shadows on the sidewalk… which they can scarcely even notice, their macular-degeneration-defying glasses are so dark… when something makes them want to open their eyes and see. A young man wearing some sort of white sport shirt and blue jeans has just sidled up to a building, whose shadow at noon is all of eighteen inches wide. He’s carrying a big CVS shopping bag. Hurriedly, there in the stingy shade, he lifts the CVS bag and holds it upside down and starts to pull it over his head. Now the gawkers can see that there is another shopping bag stuffed inside the first… that and a white towel that wants to fall out. Hurriedly he pulls the towel out and puts it on top of his head so that it drapes his face, his ears, everything down to his shoulders, in fact, and then he pulls the shopping bags, one inside the other, down over the towel, and now the gawkers can barely see a couple of inches of the towel sticking out of the bags. They can’t see his head at all. Then they see him pull a cell phone out of his blue-jeans pocket and slip it under the bags and the towel. What is this?… a nutcase—nobody can figure it out.

Under the towel and inside the bags the cell phone rings, “¡Caliente! Caliente baby… Got plenty fuego in yo’ caja china…” and the man inside the bag says, “Camacho.”

“Where are you?” says the voice of Sergeant Hernandez. “Underneath a mattress?”

“Hey, Jorge,” says Nestor, “thank God it’s you! Wait a second. Let me take all this shit off… This better?”

“Yeah, you sound halfway normal now. I can hear traffic. Where the hell are you?”

“Down on Collins Avenue. I put all this shit over my… my…” ::::::I’m not going to say “head.” He’ll think that’s very weird:::::: “over the phone so they won’t know I’m not at home.”

“Gotcha,” said Hernandez. “I do sort of the same thing—but they must know nobody has a landline anymore, just a cell phone—but never mind. Have you heard the news?”

“No… and do I even want to? I remember the last time you called me with ‘the news.’ ”

“This time maybe you do want to, I don’t know—anyway, they just let our crack dealers off! The grand jury wouldn’t indict them!”

“You’re kidding!”

“It just happened, Nestor, maybe half an hour ago. It’s all over the internet.”

“Wouldn’t indict them—why not?”

“Take a wild guess, Nestor.”

Nestor wanted to say, Because of you and your jungle bunny shit, but he caught himself. “You and me?” was all he said.

“You got it. First try. How the hell can they indict two nice young gentlemen from Overtown when the two arresting officers are racists? Right? They didn’t even call us as witnesses, Nestor, and it was our case!”

Silence. Nestor was baffled. He couldn’t figure out the consequences. Finally he said, “This means there won’t be any trial. Right?”

“Right,” said Hernandez. “And if you wanna know what I think, I say thank God for that much. I wasn’t looking forward to being on the stand, and some suit is asking me, ‘So, Sergeant Hernandez, how racist would you say you are? Just a little bit or a lot or somewhere in the middle?”

“But how’s the Department gonna take it?”

“Oh, they’re gonna say, ‘Well, that makes it official. The jury has spoken. These two walking bigots cost us a case. Who needs a couple of parasites like them?’ Without us they wouldna had a case in the first place. But you know about how much they’re gonna take that into consideration.”

“I thought grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret.”

“The are… supposed to be. The only opinions they’re supposed to give are ‘indict’ and ‘not indict.’ But you watch TV and the radio and whoever puts this stuff on the internet—the grand jury, they’re not supposed to, but they’ll talk to the bastards. It sounds like they already have. If you ask me, we’re f*cked.”

“Has anybody called you, anybody from the Department, like the zone captain or somebody?”

“Not yet, but they will… they will…”

“I don’t know about you,” said Nestor, “but I can’t just stand around waiting for the axe to fall. We’ve gotta do something.”

“Okay, tell me what. Tell me one thing we can do that won’t make it worse.”

Silence. “Give me a little time. I’ll think of something.” All he could think of at that very moment was Ghislaine. Ghislaine Ghislaine Ghislaine… He wasn’t even thinking of what she might conceivably do for him as a witness who might back him up by testifying that whatever he had said about that big side a beef in the crack house came in the heat of a life-or-death battle. No, he was thinking solely of her lovely pale fair face.

“I’m gonna find whoever made that cell phone video and get hold of the first half of it and show what really happened.”

“Yeah,” Hernandez was saying, “but you’ve already tried that.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll try again, Jorge. I’m gonna pull together an entire defense.”

“Bueee-no, muy bueee-no,” said Hernandez in a tone that identified Nestor as a hopelessly naive kid. “But you check with me… okay? You gotta be careful what you pull on when you do all this pulling together. You understand what I’m saying? Look at it this way. In a way we’re better off. The f*cking case is over. We don’t have to sit there in some courtroom and be called every goddamned thing in the world—and then get thrown off the force. You see what I mean?”

“Yeah…” said Nestor in a flat tone, all the while thinking, ::::::Spoken like a true veteran bullshitter. Maybe that’s a consolation for you because you’re the one who actually said all that stuff. I don’t feel like jumping into your grave with you.:::::: For no reason that he could have possibly explained, he thought of Ghislaine again. He could see her lovely lissome legs crossed the way they were at Starbucks… the lithe, slim, somehow French look of the calf of the leg whose bent knee lay atop the knee of the other… but he did not think about the mysteries of her loamy loins… He didn’t think of her that way… Finally he said aloud, “To tell the truth, Jorge, I don’t see what you mean. It’s no consolation to me, not going through a trial. Me, I wish to hell there was going to be a trial. I’d like to lay the whole goddamn thing out on the table, and some way I’m gonna do that.”

“Don’t you see how little difference it’s gonna make to ‘lay the whole thing out on the table’?” said Hernandez. “It could just as easy make things worse.”

Nestor said, “Yeah, well, you could be right… but I can’t just sit here… because it’s worse than that. I feel like I’m strapped into the electric chair, wondering when they’re gonna throw the switch. I’ve gotta do something, Jorge!”

“Okaaaay, amigo, but—”

“I’ll let you know,” said Nestor. “Right now I gotta go.” Not even so much as a goodbye.